After the death of Phillip Hughes, we have to ask: is sport too dangerous?

The death of the Australian cricketer is shocking - but the skill and thrill
of facing down danger are essential to this and other games

The television footage has grown ever more shocking given what happened subsequently. We pick up the action as a short, sharp ball – no different from 1,000 sent down cricket pitches across the world every day – strikes a batsman on the head. Clearly stunned, for a moment the cricketer stands with his hands on his knees. Then, quite suddenly, he pitches forward, face to the turf, utterly prone. What we now realise we were watching at that moment was the death of Phillip Hughes.

Even as we watched, few of us could appreciate the awfulness of the moment. We saw the faces of his opponents, first alarmed, then terrified. We watched them semaphoring wildly to the pavilion for medical assistance. We saw the pictures of him being swiftly taken to hospital. We heard the reports that he was in a critical condition. We learnt that his family was standing vigil at his bedside.

But everyone, all of us, assumed he would pull through. That’s what happens in sport – eventually the stricken recover. That is the narrative we prefer to hear. Like the footballer Fabrice Muamba, whose heart stopped on the field of play, we thought Hughes would return with a story to tell.

The truth was, he was already dead, killed the moment the ball, travelling at some 80mph, struck his head just behind the ear and severed a main artery. He died before our eyes.

Sport is not equipped to absorb a shock like that. Its assumptions are based on recovery. His death has made everyone and anyone who values competition ask themselves this: is it worth it? He was but 25 years old, and here he was dying on the cricket pitch, his life ebbing away before the television cameras.

In the immediate aftermath of his death, the argument has been widely aired that for a cricketer to be killed in this way runs contrary to the core purpose of any mere game, let alone one as inherently civilised as cricket. It utterly negates its function. Indeed, for his friends and family, suddenly distraught at the loss of a son, brother and partner who had apparently achieved everything in life, it will be forever impossible to extract meaning from what happened. For Sean Abbott, the fast bowler who dispatched the ball that felled him, the sense of guilt will be overwhelming. A former team mate and close friend, his intention was to take his opponent’s wicket, not threaten his life. Not for a moment can it have entered his thoughts that he was endangering Hughes. Now that man is dead.

This, in short, was not sport. It was tragedy. And never mind that it was the most freakish of circumstances, a one-in-a-million chance collision between ball and artery – cricket cannot be complacent about what happened to Hughes. The design of helmets, the condition of pitches, the visibility of the ball, all these issues will need to be properly addressed.

In the immediate aftermath of his death, the argument has been widely aired that for a cricketer to be killed in this way runs contrary to the core purpose of any mere game, let alone one as inherently civilised as cricket. It utterly negates its function. Indeed, for his friends and family, suddenly distraught at the loss of a son, brother and partner who had apparently achieved everything in life, it will be forever impossible to extract meaning from what happened. For Sean Abbott, the fast bowler who dispatched the ball that felled him, the sense of guilt will be overwhelming. A former team mate and close friend, his intention was to take his opponent’s wicket, not threaten his life. Not for a moment can it have entered his thoughts that he was endangering Hughes. Now that man is dead.

This, in short, was not sport. It was tragedy. And never mind that it was the most freakish of circumstances, a one-in-a-million chance collision between ball and artery – cricket cannot be complacent about what happened to Hughes. The design of helmets, the condition of pitches, the visibility of the ball, all these issues will need to be properly addressed.

But there will be those who will look for something more, who will question whether there is any point the game continuing as it is. Nick Hoult, this newspaper’s cricket writer, has recently reported on the catastrophic diminution in the number of those playing cricket in England. This is a sport that is failing to engage the next generation, membership of the village clubs that long formed its bedrock withering. And no parent is going to encourage their child to take up a bat if those in charge appear not to be reacting robustly to this most awful event.

It is likely that those in charge of a sport that is already vulnerable may well be moved to make radical alterations to its processes. There have been calls to ban short-pitched fast bowling, the sort that gets a lethally hard ball to rear up at a batsman’s head, the sort that took Phil Hughes’s life. Just as the urge is there to excise the danger inherent in the rugby scrum, the demand is that such risk be removed from the game.

Yet risk is an absolute fundamental of sport. That has long been its very point. For those who participate, it is the adrenalin rush of successfully overcoming their own fear. For those of us who watch, it is the vicarious thrill of seeing risk being accepted, negotiated and ultimately triumphantly overcome.

It is inherent in all that we enjoy. Were you or I to enter the ring with the British heavyweight Anthony Joshua, never mind a full-blooded upper cut, an exploratory jab from his concrete right fist would permanently extinguish our lights. Were we to attempt to navigate a U-bend at 150mph at the wheel of a Mercedes Formula One car, we would end up in a smouldering pile of wreckage. Were we to leap over a fence at Cheltenham’s race course, no matter the power and grace of our mount, we would quickly be deposited on the turf.

A challenger, however, will soon take on Joshua and emerge absolutely intact; Lewis Hamilton has just triumphantly concluded an entire F1 season in that self-same Mercedes without ever compromising his core safety; and, next March, dozens of jockeys will successfully traverse Cheltenham’s hazards, not once but half a dozen times at the Festival. What separates them from us is that they will do so after years of training and preparation. They will have spent much of their life working to perfect the art not of eliminating risk entirely, but of reducing it, of living with it, of facing it down.

And the fact is, when it comes to cricket, it is the overcoming of the bouncer, the very ball that took Hughes’s life, that has given the game some of its defining moments. The bespectacled David Steele taking on Australia’s twin terrors Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in the Seventies; Brian Close standing up to West Indian “chin music” later in that decade; and, best of all, the magnificently belligerent Michael Atherton refusing to yield to the South African Allan Donald, a display of bravery that still makes the heart beat faster watched at a distance of some 16 years.

We knew, even as we watched, that those men were in danger. Real danger. Yet we thrilled to their refusal to be cowed. If first-class cricket were to have such danger expunged then it would place itself in risk of emasculation. If the bowling were gently non-aggressive, it would mean any of us could play it. And if you want to know the difference between the amateur and the professional, then all you need to do is seek out footage of Piers Morgan’s joust in the nets with Brett Lee on the last Ashes tour. Morgan did not want for courage in his brush with the Aussie fast bowler. But as he skips around, rapidly backing away in growing terror as the ball hurtles in his direction, what you appreciate is that he lacks the necessary wherewithal properly to overcome the danger. That is what marks out the talented. Without that test, they are no different from us.

What has been challenged by Hughes’s awful death, however, is the value we place on this test. Can we legitimately continue to revere a process in which the participant – however willing he may be – is in such jeopardy? Is our addiction to sport and its dangers fundamentally any different from those citizens who thrilled to the drama of the Colosseum, watching gladiators in mortal peril, relishing their escape from death? Surely this is the same instinct, albeit moderated for modern tastes. Maybe Hughes’s death will make us reassess that urge.

If that is so – if such an awful accident has arrived at a moment where we feel that such visceral engagement is no longer justifiable – then we have to recognise that the very point of sport has been removed. The truth is that without risk, cricket would become merely running around.